The Myth of Meritocracy: A Political Perspective

The word was coined as satire and adopted as an ideal. What the mobility data actually shows, why the belief persists regardless, and the political consequences of telling people they deserve their position.

Written by Ottavio Malatacca · Published 2026-04-23 · Updated 2026-08-30

Meritocracy is close to a universal value in contemporary politics. Parties that agree on nothing else agree that positions should be allocated by talent and effort rather than by birth. That near-unanimity is worth examining, partly because the evidence on whether developed societies achieve it is discouraging, and partly because the term was invented as a warning about a society that succeeded at it.

A word coined as satire

Michael Young introduced meritocracy in The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), a dystopian satire written from the perspective of a historian in 2033. Young imagined a Britain that had genuinely eliminated inherited privilege and allocated every position by measured intelligence and effort. His point was that this society would be crueller than the one it replaced.

The reasoning is worth following. Under an aristocracy, those at the bottom can hold onto the belief that the hierarchy is arbitrary — the people above them were simply born there. That belief preserves self-respect and supplies grounds for solidarity and revolt. Under a perfect meritocracy, the hierarchy is deserved. Those at the bottom are there because they were fairly measured and found wanting. Young's fictional historian is writing shortly before a populist uprising that the narrator cannot comprehend, because by his own criteria the system is functioning exactly as intended.

Young lived to see his coinage adopted as an unambiguous compliment by the politicians of his own party, and wrote a bitter article in 2001 objecting. The satire had been read as a blueprint.

What the mobility evidence shows

Two distinct measurements matter here and they are frequently conflated.

Intergenerational income elasticity measures how much of a parent's income advantage is transmitted to a child. Across developed countries it ranges from roughly 0.15 in Denmark to around 0.45–0.5 in the United States and the United Kingdom. The higher figure means that nearly half of a parent's relative economic position is inherited. Cross-country comparison produces the pattern Miles Corak named the Great Gatsby Curve: countries with higher inequality reliably show lower mobility. The two are not independent variables.

Absolute mobility measures something more immediate — whether a person earns more than their parents did at the same age. Work by Raj Chetty and colleagues found that this figure fell in the United States from over 90 per cent for the 1940 birth cohort to around 50 per cent for the 1980 cohort. Their decomposition attributes most of the decline to the changed distribution of growth rather than to the growth rate itself. Comparable trends appear across much of Western Europe.

Chetty's geographic work adds a further finding that is politically important: mobility varies enormously between regions within a single country, and correlates strongly with local segregation, school quality, family structure and social capital. Where a child grows up predicts their adult outcome to a degree that is difficult to reconcile with the meritocratic account.

The mechanisms of transmission

Inherited advantage does not operate mainly through bequests, which is why inheritance taxation addresses only a fraction of it. The larger channels are diffuse and mostly legal.

• Early childhood environment. Measurable gaps in vocabulary and cognitive development by socioeconomic status appear well before formal schooling begins, and early gaps compound.
• Residential sorting. Where school quality is tied to local property values, buying a house is buying an education, and the transaction is invisible in any measure of school fees.
• Direct educational investment. Tutoring, extracurricular activity, unpaid internships and the capacity to support a young adult through a low-paid entry period into a desirable profession.
• Networks and cultural fluency. Access to people who can make an introduction, and familiarity with the manner and reference points that hiring processes reward without noticing that they do.
• Risk tolerance. A young person with a family able to absorb failure can take the entrepreneurial or creative gamble that a young person without one cannot rationally take.

Each channel is individually defensible. Few people would argue that parents should be prevented from reading to their children. Their aggregate effect is a hereditary transmission of position that operates through millions of ordinary, blameless decisions, which is precisely what makes it so resistant to policy.

The deeper objection: is merit itself deserved?

Suppose a society eliminated every one of those channels and allocated positions purely by talent and effort. John Rawls argued in A Theory of Justice (1971) that this would still not be a system of desert, and his argument is more radical than most people who invoke him realise.

Natural talent is unchosen — nobody earns their genetic endowment or their neurological aptitude for abstraction. Rawls goes further: the capacity for sustained effort is itself substantially the product of upbringing, temperament and circumstance, and is therefore no more deserved than the talent. If neither the ability nor the disposition to work hard is earned, then the market rewards flowing from their combination are not deserved either, in the strict moral sense.

Rawls does not conclude that talent should go unrewarded. He concludes that differential rewards are justified instrumentally — because they induce productive activity that benefits everyone, including the worst off — rather than because the recipient morally deserves them. This distinction is the whole substance of the difference principle, and it converts the question from what does this person deserve into what arrangement makes the worst-off position as good as possible.

The political consequences of meritocratic belief

Michael Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit (2020) develops Young's argument for contemporary conditions and identifies two effects.

Among winners it produces what Sandel calls the hubris of merit — the conviction that success is self-made, which erodes any felt obligation to those who did not succeed and any acknowledgement of luck. Among those who did not succeed it produces something worse: not merely material disadvantage but the judgement that the disadvantage was earned. The meritocratic promise converts economic failure into personal verdict.

Sandel connects this to the credentialist turn in centre-left politics, where the standard answer to economic dislocation became more education. The unspoken message to those who did not or could not take that route was that their difficulty was a failure of individual adaptation. This is one plausible route from meritocratic rhetoric to the anti-elite resentment examined in our essay on populism, and it explains why hostility is so often directed at educational credentials specifically rather than at wealth as such.

The counter-argument, taken seriously

The case for meritocracy should not be dismissed. Compared with the realistic alternatives — allocation by birth, by party loyalty, by ethnicity, by patronage — allocating by demonstrated competence is enormously preferable, both morally and in outcomes. Nobody wants surgeons selected by lottery. The historical record of societies that abandoned competence criteria for political ones is uniformly grim.

There is also a real risk in the critique. If effort makes no difference to outcomes, the rational response is not to make any, and the belief that hard work pays is itself partly self-fulfilling. The strongest version of the critique does not deny that effort matters. It denies that the outcome is a full and fair measure of the effort, and it denies that the resulting hierarchy licenses moral judgement of the people at the bottom.

Where this sits on the compass

The meritocracy argument maps cleanly onto the economic axis and reveals what that axis is really measuring. Positions to the right treat market outcomes as broadly informative about contribution, and treat interference with them as both unjust and inefficient. Positions to the left treat market outcomes as heavily conditioned by starting position, and treat correction as a matter of justice rather than charity.

Notice that this disagreement is largely empirical rather than moral. Both sides typically endorse equality of opportunity. They disagree about how far current arrangements deliver it, and therefore about how much intervention is required to reach a shared goal. Several questions on our test are constructed to separate that empirical judgement from the underlying value, because the two are routinely bundled together in ordinary political argument.

Conclusion

Meritocracy functions less as a description of how developed societies work than as a legitimating story about why their hierarchies are acceptable. The mobility data does not support the description. Young's warning was that the story would become most corrosive precisely when it became most accurate — that a society which really did sort people fairly would have removed the last defence available to those it sorted downward. Sixty-eight years later, developed democracies have the resentment he predicted without having built the fair sorting that was supposed to justify it.